54. So easily assimilated

For this year’s Christmas music post, I decided to look more deeply into a Polish carol that is familiar in English-speaking countries with the words “Infant holy, Infant lowly.”  That text, penned by Edith Margaret Gellibrand Reed, dates only as far back as 1920.  A mystery I’ve been unable to solve is why Reed’s setting appeared first in an American publication (Primary Education, December 1920), and not in her own UK periodical (Music and Youth) until twelve months later.  Both appear below.  The first publication is marred by a number of infelicities (I assume misprints) which are rectified in the later publication.  I have marked those changes are in red, as well as some changes to the lyrics.  But notice the last three notes of Reed’s version of this melody—I’ll come back to them later.

SOURCE:  composite image, (l). scan of p. 641 of Primary Education (December 1920); (r) cropped scan of p. 945 of Music and Youth (December 1921).  [For larger image, click here.]

Reed’s text aimed at a G-rated children’s carol, and it has the usual suspects of the nativity pageant:  divinely well-behaved Baby in manger, lowing cattle, amazed shepherds, radiant angels, and stunning news.  The Polish text (or at least the only Polish text I have found associated with the melody) is “”W żłobie leży” [“He lies in a manger”].  I have not had the means to do a comprehensive search, but the earliest source I have located was a hymnal printed in 1838.  It includes three distinct but related melodies for the text:

SOURCE:  scans from the Biblioteka Narodawa of Śpiewnik kościelny czyli Pieśni nabożne z melodyjami... ed. Michał Mioduszewski (1838), pp. 30, 31, and 32; the final stanza concludes on p. 33.  The footnote on p. 30 indicates that the first tune is the most commonly used.

I know no Polish, but with the help of a number of friends I learned that the original text is very different from the innocent (even innocuous) English.  The first few verses are cast in the first-person plural:  we will sing for the baby, we will follow the shepherds, we will make him happy.  But then it turns to the second person singular, asking pointed questions:  Why are you in a manger?  Why does the world not accept you?  Then, finally, we have a response from the baby:  He foretells a blood bath such as will make the weeping in Ramah seem trivial by comparison; yet it is the bath in my blood that brings salvation. 

This is to say that “W żłobie leży” is much more substantial and challenging than “Infant holy, Infant lowly.”  But it has been assimilated into a different culture—a comfortable, early twentieth-century middle class culture which didn’t want any reminders of weeping in Ramah [Jeremiah 31; Matthew 2].  I had a little trouble associating the melody with anything except a lullaby, at least until I started looking at some Polish organ settings of the tune which ended in grand ff statements.  (If you’re interested, see the two settings in IMSLP #791869.)  And these reminded me of another organ setting of this tune, in a collection of noëls by Alexandre Guilmant.  He begins quite portentously:

SOURCE:  Guilmant op. 60, book 2, no.1 (bb. 1-9), from IMSLP #03921, a reprint of original 1886 Schott edition.

(Here’s a good performance.)  Eventually Guilmant gets around to stating the theme:

 SOURCE:  Guilmant op. 60, book 2, no.1 (bb. 20-37), from IMSLP #03921, as above.

The heading describes this piece as “based on an old Polish carol”; at the presentation of the theme, there is an asterisk referring the user to this footnote:

 SOURCE:  Footnote on the page of the above example, from IMSLP #03921

Guilmant reveals his source for this “ancien noël Polonais” (thus evidently not in a common repertory in France at the time) but what Fr. Victor Thirion’s source was we do not know.  Guilmant gives us a French title for this tune:  “Accourez bergers fidèles, l'heure bénie a sonnée” (roughly “Hurry, faithful shepherds, the blessed hour has sounded”—in any case, nothing like either the Polish or the later English texts).  Most important, however, is the re-barring of the music:  unlike the Polish source above (and, indeed, the early publications of “Infant holy, Infant lowly”), Guilmant starts the melody on an up-beat.  My guess is that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription—that he heard it as an upbeat, and notated it that way.

This metrical dislocation appears in a considerable number of hymnals and carol books that use Reed’s “Infant holy, Infant lowly” text—but it is striking that in the earliest printings of her version the carol starts invariably on the downbeat.  Indeed, the earliest version I have located of the English “Infant holy, Infant lowly” text with the tune shifted a beat over à la Guilmant is not until 1950 (well after Reed’s death), where it appears in the Armed Forces Hymnal:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Armed Forces Hymnal, p. 211, from Archive.org

The harmonization is here attributed to David Hugh Jones (a professor at Westminster Choir College); the copyright at the bottom of the page indicates the source as the Kingsway Carol Book, but that source preserves Reed's arrangement almost intact.  

So how did this metrical change happen?  While I think that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription, it just as well might have been an intentional change by either Thirion or Guilmant (or somebody earlier in the transmission chain).  In any case, I think it very likely that the change happened in France, not in Poland:  that it was an act of assimilation to make the tune more readily comprehensible to French ears, just as David Hugh Jones acted in the same way to make it more readily comprehensible to American ones.  The opening melodic gesture—the move from the fifth scale-degree up to the tonic—is (I pronounce, as if ex cathedra) more commonly found crossing the barline (i.e., upbeat to downbeat) in the Western European and American hymn and carol repertories.  More than this—although one can certainly find the rhythm 

in Anglo-American hymns—almost all the examples that occur to me are iambic rather than trochaic, thus preceded by a quarter-note upbeat:

I’m thinking of examples like AZMON (a tune particularly associated with “O for a thousand tongues to sing”) and SOLID ROCK (William Bradbury’s tune for “My hope is built on nothing less”).  The sole trochaic exception that comes to mind is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s splendid KING’S WESTON, which rescues the 6.5.6.5.D text “At the name of Jesus” from a myriad of tunes that all give the same prosaic and predictable pattern (essentially the rhythm of Sullivan’s tune for “Onward, Christian Soldiers”):

... but I digress.

The point I’m trying to get to is that the metrical shift imposed upon the “W żłobie leży” tune is something akin to what the officers at Ellis Island did to surnames as they processed the immigrants entering the country:  they regularized them into something more familiar, maybe with the intent of making them easier for others to spell and pronounce, or maybe because they transliterated what they perceived as the names were pronounced.  Or they were lazy.  Or they didn’t care.  And it worked, and this tune has become a regular fixture among the Anglo-American carol repertory.  Like the Old Woman in Bernstein’s Candide, it is easily assimilated.  (A long way from Rovno Gubernya, indeed.)

I have referred before in this blog to the generally excellent New Oxford Book of Carols by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott.  Here is their comment about this item:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of The New Oxford Book of Carols p. 605.

This note leaves quite a lot to be desired:

1. The misplaced bar-lines are in fact extremely common in the US, although granted the tune is now appearing with the (Polish) down-beat beginning with increasing frequency in US hymnals.
2. Reed’s version didn’t appear first in Music and Youth—although, again, I cannot explain how it made it (flaws and all) into Primary Education the previous year.  (For that tidbit, I thank the Hymns and Carols of Christmas website.)
3. Keyte and Parrott say that Reed’s text “was written for the mis-stressed version,” but her version is like the Polish sources (beginning on the beat), and it’s not clear that she would have known anything else.  (While some sources refer to the mazurka rhythm of the original, Reed’s commentary in Music and Youth actually describes the “W żłobie leży” tune as a polonaise specifically, rather than a mazurka.)
4. They also refer to an “obvious misprint” that led to the wrong notes at the ending (as given in Reed’s version).  I don’t know that this could have come from anyone other than Reed, and it seems not at all to be a misprint:  

SOURCE:  detail of p. 945 of Music and Youth (December 1921)

This is the 1921 printing; not only is this ending not “corrected” from the 1920 reading, but it is confirmed not only in the piano accompaniment and the Tonic Sol-Fa notation (which reads fa – mi – do), and the two-bar piano echo.  If this is a misprint, it must be from a source prior to Reed and upong which she based her text.  Such has not been located.  Maybe instead this is Reed’s own “improvement”?

That piano echo (preceded by the deceptive cadence under the last sung note) seems to have been Reed’s creation, and it is probably another element of assimilation, stretching the fourteen bars of the Polish version into a more typical classical sixteen.  It has had a long-lasting legacy, as all but one of the page scans of “Infant holy, Infant lowly” on Hymnary.org had the deceptive cadence and extra two (sung) bars.  Corrupted texts are immortal, or at least have nine lives.

One of the big surprises to me in all of this digging was that the tune was known in at least one English hymnal decades before Reed.  In 1877 it appeared in The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer with Accompanying Tunes with the text “Angels from the realms of glory.”   Here it was assimilated in a very different way:  it has been Victorianized, flattened out into all half-notes.

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of p. 54 of The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer... from Archive.org

Ian Bradley’s Penguin Book of Carols alerted me to this version.  Bradley remarks that the Polish tune’s “date is uncertain but it may well go back to the Middle Ages.”  I doubt it, at least as far as the tune is concerned.  To my ears it is just too tonal to be medieval.  Very few medieval specimens can don tonal garb and successfully “pass.”  (The c. 1400 tune “In dulci jubilo” is to me the exception that proves that rule.)  Rather, it suggests the Biedermier era of “Stille Nacht” (1820s).  Indeed, one of the melodies has a passage that strongly resembles the German folk carol “O Tannenbaum” (popularized with that text in 1824) [highlighted in red in the following illustration],  followed by something like the concluding phrase of the late-18th-century tune for the pseudo-ancient drinking song, “Gaudeamus igitur” [highlighted in yellow].

SOURCE:  marked up detail of above illustration from  of Śpiewnik kościelny czyli Pieśni nabożne z melodyjami... ed. Michał Mioduszewski (1838), pp. 30,

The IMSLP and other repositories had all sorts of Polish settings of one or another of the “W żłobie leży” melodies.  Without taking the space for them here, I link a few below (in addition to the organ settings linked above) because I found them all very interesting:

• Zygmunt Noskowski’s male-choir arrangement, in Sześć kolend, op. 56/ii (1898) IMSLP #696256
• another male-choir arrangement, no. 90 of Kazimierz Garbusiński's 100 Kolend, IMSLP #705961
• Louis Sawicki’s rather polonaise-looking piano setting, no. 3 of 6 Chants religieux de Noël (n.d.)  IMSLP #166628
• somebody’s fair-copy manuscript of Władysław Żeleński’s unpublished Koledy, where it is no. 3 #756521
• a 1908 school hymnbook with two-part settings (and which includes the more familiar (to me) melody as the alternate, Śpiewniczek zawierający pieśni kościelne... (see scan p. 107f.)

These sources demonstrate that several related melodies continued in use in Poland for a long time.  One has overtaken the rest, and I have no idea how much any of the others persist to this day.  As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m all in favor of textual pluralism, and I’d like to hear the other melodies sung more frequently.

The other thing that surprised—or rather staggered—me, as I browsed through many Polish carol books researching this post, was the sheer number of good tunes out there of which I have been completely ignorant.  All very humbling.  And if I found them strange at times, I was thankful that they hadn’t been assimilated.

37. Corroborative detail

I will begin with what was intended to be a digression, but has ended up taking over the post:

There is a charming detail of orchestration in the trio “Three Little Maids from School” in (Gilbert &) Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885).  Just as Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, and Peep-Bo are finishing up the refrain, they pause:

Three little maids who, all unwary,

Come from a ladies’ seminary,

Freed from its genius tutelary—

And in that moment, with the whole orchestra falling silent, a bassoon bubbles into life.


That bassoon idea was an afterthought.  A glance at the composer’s manuscript shows not just a blank bar at this point, but that originally he had notated a rest (in ink).  The bassoon effect has been pencilled-in later:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the 1968 facsimile of the autograph score of The Mikado, p. 143 (bb. 40–46a)

And there does not seem to be any document to establish with certainty when it was added.  By the 1880s, Sullivan’s practice was to sketch the musical numbers (and here is such a sketch for “Three Little Maids”), and then transfer the vocal lines onto the pages of what would later become the full score—ruling in the bars as necessary, but writing in only enough to give a copyist a means of preparing a sort of rudimentary vocal score for rehearsal.  The numbers would not be done in the order of the show:  the choruses and ensembles generally came first, with the solos later.  Only after the whole of the opera was “framed” would Sullivan turn to the orchestration, filling in the blank staves.  When the full score of a number was complete, the orchestral parts could be prepared and the keyboard reduction for the published vocal score finalized.

Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which dramatizes the months preceding The Mikado’s premiere, missed the chance to realize this moment.  Although there is a scene in which Sullivan has an exchange with the bassoonist, we do not see him have a flash of inspiration in the pit, handing down last-minute instructions to gurgle away.  Fun as that might have been, it is probably just as well that no such scene occurs, as we do not know that this episode occurred in the rehearsals for the first production.  Then again, the bubbling bassoon figure is played in performance in the movie, when by rights it should not have been.  It does not appear in vocal scores until the twentieth century; but admittedly, Sullivan took nowhere near as much care with the published scores as Gilbert did with the published libretti.  The absence of the bassoon whinny in the vocal scores (and the distinct piano-only score, which derives from the vocal score) is not strong evidence of anything beyond—as we know already—that it was not originally there.

Is it even the composer’s amendment at all?  I believe it is.  That the idea was an inspiration in the pit—as characterized above—is suggested by the notation in the manuscript:  the contour of the figure is there, but it is unclear what the pitches should be and one would certainly not guess from this scribble that the first note is d'.  This emendation his was not notated here for the eyes of a copyist; it appears to me to be nothing more than a hastily-added aide-mémoire to the composer of this addition.  Indeed, the strongest bits of evidence that this pencilled addition is indeed by the composer are 1) it is in the autograph, which in performances would have almost immediately been supplanted by a copyist’s conducting score of some sort; and 2) the bassoon is so imprecisely notated.  I would expect anyone else making such an interpolation to make it as neat as possible.  (In any case, the bassoon part needs the actual pitches much more than the full score does.)

For this to be Sullivan's own interpolation would require an occasion when the composer and his autograph score (not a company copy) were both together back in the pit to conduct a rehearsal, since this change could not realistically have been added during a performance.  As Sullivan generally did not often conduct after the opening night of an initial production, the possibilities for such an occasion after March 1885 are slim indeed.  He did, however, conduct the opening night of a revival at the Savoy Theatre on 6 November 1895, and he may well have rehearsed the company before that performance.  (Not having his diaries at hand—although they are extant—I cannot answer that question definitively at the moment.)

Two tidbits suggest that this 1895 production (rather than the original) was the occasion for the change.  One is the account of Thomas Dunhill, in his Sullivan’s Comic Operas:  A Critical Appreciation (1928):

[C]ould anything show more witchery than the use of the silent bar, just before the end of two of the verses?  Was Sullivan afraid that it could never be silent enough when, on the occasion of rehearsing one of the revivals, he broke this silence by pencilling a little curling phrase into the bassoon player’s part?  This stroke is amongst the most delicious of after-thoughts, but it is not in the original score.  One would gladly hear the passage both ways, on different occasions.  [pp. 131f.] 

The second tidbit is that the 1893 full score of The Mikado published by Bosworth (a German firm  heavily backed by Sullivan) has the original gran pausa here:  the autograph seems to have been the source for the Bosworth edition, so if the amendment had been made by 1893, the lithographist preparing the new edition apparently didn’t take it seriously:

SOURCE:  cropped page-scan of Kalmus reprint of Bosworth full score, p. 139, from IMSLP #30034 (bb. 40–43)

(I was a little surprised to find the bubbling bassoon absent from the 1907 recording as well, but in that instance the music had been heavily rescored to be audible with pre-electric technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the orchestration was done from the published vocal score, if not the Bosworth score—both of which lacked the figure in question.)

I have no doubt that—as Dunhill asserts—the idea is Sullivan’s own, but the case is not airtight.

As I say, all of this was supposed to have been a tangential point; I was going to introduce it because it seemed like an example of an musical detail conceived later than the rest of its context, perhaps suggesting itself to the composer because of the different activity—conducting a rehearsal with orchestra rather than composing in silence at his desk.  There are many examples one might use to illustrate such second thoughts, but I had thought this would be a fun one because some years ago I noticed that on 12 March 1885,  two nights before conducting the premiere of The Mikado, Sullivan had conducted Beethoven's Symphony no. 4 at the Philharmonic Concerts.  What if (I had thought) the giggling bassoon line was suggested to him by a celebrated bassoon solo in Beethoven’s finale?  (Granted, Sullivan's line resembles better the figures in the finale of Mozart’s Symphony no. 39, but never mind.)  Wouldn’t that be loverly?  Only as I came to look at it more closely did I see that there was not enough evidence to connect it to the Beethoven, so then I might as well use any example I liked.  I just got stuck on this one.

Having let the tail wag the dog for so many paragraphs, I will let the “dog” bark briefly here.  A few evenings ago I played the first movement of Alexandre Guilmant’s first organ sonata in a recital of “Scary Organ Music.”  It is a piece I first came to know as his Premiére Symphonie pour Orgue et Orchestre, op. 42 (1879)—hearing it (as mentioned in a previous post) in a splendid recording conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier; only later did I learn that the work started as a work for organ alone, the Premiére Sonate pour Orgue, also Op. 42 (1874).  The piece works so well for organ and orchestra together that it is hard to fathom that it was not originally conceived that way.

Below is a stemma of sources for these two versions that I have been reviewing in recent months.  The shaded boxes are sources I have not examined; the red text/lines trace the transmission of the orchestral version, while the black follows the organ solo version.  It will be seen that there is a complex interrelationship between the two versions, as ideas that crept into the orchestration gradually make their way into the text of the solo version—a few in the second edition, a few more in the third.   (Double lines indicate reprints of the same text.)

By far the bulk of these changes are rhythmic articulations where the original (in so far as I can determine it) had only sustained chords.  Thus, at the conclusion of the first movement (here copied from the 1876 Schirmer edition, but the Bärenreiter critical commentary testifies to the same reading in the autograph), Guilmant wrote:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Schirmer edition (IMSLP #290298), p. 13, showing I/353–359.

In the second edition this passage already has some substantial changes (marked in red below).

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Leupold reprint of 2nd edition, p. 45, showing I/353–359 (my hightlights added)

All of these, in fact, have their origins in the orchestration, the chords at bb. 355–56 rearticulated with an antiphonal effect between organ and orchestra, and the brass introducing the new figure at the final cadence (with consequently shorter note-values for those penultimate chords):

SOURCE:  cropped screen-shot from the first edition full score (IMSLP #245332), p. 43, showing I/354–359.

Rather than belaboring this point (as I had originally intended to), I will confine myself to one additional example—a change which does not make it into the sonata until the 1898 third edition, although clearly comes from the 1878 orchestration.  Here is the opening of the first movement as in the Schirmer edition (and the reading is identical (save for French-language registration markings) in the second edition):

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Schirmer edition (IMSLP #290298), p. 1, showing I/1–3.

Now here is the opening of the first movement as in the third edition:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Leupold reprint of 3rd edition, p. 1, showing I/1–2.

(And don't get me started about all those slurs.)  Again, the dramatic rhythmic punctuation—which he has very cleverly accomplished by the engaging of a manual coupler to a chord already being sustained—has its origins in the orchestration:

SOURCE:  cropped screen-shot from the first edition full score (IMSLP #245332), p. 1, showing I/1–2.

Clearly Guilmant liked the effects he had devised for the Symphonie, and he found ways of folding them into the Sonate.  This evokes The Mikado—not just the added bassoon in “Three Little Maids,” but also one of Gilbert’s lines of dialogue.   In Act II Pooh-Bah justifies his graphic embellishments to Ko-ko’s (entirely fabricated) account of executing the emperor's son thus:

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

(Actually, this takes us back even to Topsy-Turvy.  If the film missed the opportunity of highlighting a textual change of the score, it does in fact depict Gilbert making a textual change to the libretto during a rehearsal, adding the word “otherwise” to this line.  I am not aware of any evidence to support that, but it is a nice moment.)

If we take Pooh-Bah’s “corroborative detail” to be ameliorations made after the fact to an original that was already sufficient in itself, then these details manifest that sort of corroboration.  Neither “Three Little Maids” or Guilmant’s organ sonata is “bald and unconvincing” in its original version, but I think the addition of a little corroborative detail paid off in both cases.

26. Moving targets (Episode #4)

A recurring theme on this blog is the source that purports to be one thing while it is actually something else.  (In a previous post I discussed this regarding sources for Handel’s Messiah available on the IMSLP.)  Another recurring theme is the edition (or sometimes even manuscript) that changes over time without necessarily calling attention to those changes.  (A post considered this with the case of Bernstein’s Overture to Candide.)  This post combines a little of both.  And while this may all seem innocuous, I’m not sure that it is.

Musicians will be familiar with the American firm Dover Publications.  By the 1970s and 80s they had turned almost entirely to sturdy reprints of public domain editions.  Their output extends far beyond music, and I can remember browsing through their sales catalog, bemused and amazed by the range of reprints for which they could find a market.  Since the 1990s they have originated a few editions of music, but their bread and butter has been reprinting out-of-print editions at competitive prices.  In contrast to the reprints from firms like Kalmus, Dover has made durable products, and the blurb on the back (“this is a permanent book”) wasn’t much of an overstatement.  A few of the scores I’ve used the most have fallen into pieces, but many of the Dover books I got 25+ years ago are still in good condition.

In about 1997 someone at Dover had the bright idea of issuing miniature scores, which would open up a wider educational market.  There was a problem with this:  a lot of the scores they were reprinting originally had appeared in a very large format—say 14 or 15 inches tall.  That was the case of the old Bach Gesellschaft edition, from which Dover drew extensively.  Dover’s “large” scores were already a reduction of the original dimensions:  often 9x12, sometimes 8.5x11.  The smallest of the Dover “large” scores I’ve used is their reprint of Franck organ works, an oblong volume measuring only 8.25 inches at the spine; the original Durand scores from which these were taken measured some 10.5 inches at the spine (although with more generous margins).  The further reduction to a miniature score format can be awkward.

And that is apparently what happened.  Dover’s first release of study scores were the same size as their popular “thrift” reprints of literature, with dimensions of 5x8 or slightly larger.  Within a few years, the same publications (with the same ISBNs) were issued in a slightly larger format.  The images below show side by side these two issues of one of these early publications:

SOURCE:  I put both copies side by side in the photocopier and scanned them, front and back.

The score on the left I got in the fall of 1998 as desk copy for a course for which I was one of the instructors.  I’m not sure when I got the copy on the right, but judging from some notes I made in it I must have had it by 2002.  The key differences on the back cover:  the elimination of the clause “ample margins at the bottom of each score page for notes an analysis” (which itself betrayed that the dimensions of the publication were not calculated with the right “aspect ratio” for the matter that was to appear on the page), the addition of a list of some other available scores, and the increased price (marked-up 1/3).  The contents are the same, so far as I can make out, and it would surprise me if they weren't.

Note the source of this publication.  Here it is (again) from either copyright page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover miniature score.

The words “an authoritative edition, n.d.” scarcely inspire confidence.  Most of the publications in this series reprint the same edition that Dover issued in a larger format.  Ironically, the large-score publication of Haydn's London symphonies reprinted a series of miniature scores:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover full score.

Eulenburg scores were designed to be small-format.  To my eye, Dover’s enlargement appears odd (there seems to be too much space between staves, too little information on each page) where the proportions seem right in the original format.

It would be reasonable to assume that the Dover miniature score was a reprint of this same text.  Indeed, the IMSLP has assumed as much:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot from IMSLP (accessed 20 June 2017)

But it isn’t so.  Below is a comparison of the first page:  the Dover 1985 (Eulenburg reprint) is on the left; the Dover 1997 miniature score is on the right.  (Apologies for the size of the image, but you can scroll back and forth as necessary to see the details.)

While even at first glance these are recognizably different scores, the differences are not just in the formatting (two systems for the first page of the miniature score).  There are textual differences too.  The miniature score has an initial dynamic of ff for the entire ensemble, has introduced crescendo hairpins in b. 5, and has accents rather than sf in the Violino I part in bb. 3-5.  The miniature score has 58 pages of music, while the Dover/Eulenburg has 74 (not surprising for a score designed to be in small format).

The score I refer to as Dover/Eulenburg (that is, the 1985 Dover reprint) is what it purports to be.  Here is the first page of the Eulenburg score, as proof of that:

SOURCE:  digital scan of p. 1 of 1936 Eulenburg score (ed. Ernst Praetorius)

What, then, is the “authoritative edition” that Dover reprinted in 1997?  It ought to be on the shelves somewhere—and readers at big music libraries might be able to lay their hands on it quickly.  I have pursued it via interlibrary loan (ordering up every edition I can find), but even then editions can be miscatalogued in so many ways.  I haven’t found it yet, and I would be glad to know.  Anyone?  I will be delighted to have an addendum to this post once the source edition is located.

ADDENDUM  21 June 2021

Many thanks to Rex Levang for pointing out that the mystery text appears now on the IMSLP as a Soviet edition (IMSLP #494060), but there is no indication of whether that edition itself was a reprint.  (I suspect it is--it just doesn’t have the look of a Soviet edition to me, although I freely admit that I can’t muster any specific evidence to support that opinion.)  The IMSLP cites Gyorgy Kirkor as the editor, and all twelve of the London Symphonies appear in the same imprint.  If this was an original edition (i.e., not a reprint), it is an odd choice for Dover.

14. “Transport of Pleasure”

This post appears a day ahead of schedule; given the ... uh... nature of the material, I think the reason for this will be clear.

One of the pleasures of doing a blog is the opportunity it affords to dwell on subjects outside of my usual area.  When I was choosing grad schools, I chose Cornell precisely because of a historic strength there in eighteenth-century music:  Haydn, Mozart, and the Bach family in particular.  I ended up concentrating on much later music, but in many senses the eighteenth century still feels like home turf.  I haven’t published professionally on those repertories, and blogging is my chance to get my feet wet and my hands dirty.

Last summer, sheetmusicplus.com was having a sale of 20% off all Henle publications.  I had just run across a second-hand copy of the critical report to the first volume of songs of Joseph Haydn Werke (or JHW, the ongoing critical edition of Haydn's works), so in the sale I bought the Henle offprint of that volume aimed at the performance market.  I had stumbled across Haydn’s “English Canzonettas” while in high school, and I came to know them from the 1931 Peters edition (edited by Ludwig Landshoff), but I had never looked into the textual situation underlying them.  This seemed like an admirable opportunity to do some neglected homework.

That JHW volume appeared in 1960, edited by Paul Mies.  He died in 1976 before a critical report for the volume was issued.  The task of completing that fell to the intrepid Marianne Helms, who has done prodigious (and comparatively thankless) work for both the JHW and the NBA (the new Bach edition).  Her critical report appeared in 1983, and at the same time Henle issued the offprint of the score.  The offprint is actually preferable to the original, as it incorporates the corrections listed in the errata of the report.  These are numerous and sometimes very substantial, including the deletion of one item (discovered to be the work of Adalbert Gyrowetz).

Another revelation that only came to light after the JHW volume was published was rather racy: the text for one of the second set of “English Canzonettas” (no. 6, “Content”) had been cleaned up after the first publication in 1795.  The song in the first edition was entitled “Transport of Pleasure,” but already the second issue of the first edition presents “Content.”  That this came to light only after 1960 reveals that Paul Mies did not use the first issue of the first edition as one of his sources when he prepared the score volume; or, more likely, he was unaware that there were three distinct issues from the initial set of plates.  A scan of the uncorrected first issue is available on the IMSLP, although it lacks the last two pages; this is curious, as the source of the IMSLP scan is listed as Stanford University, but the scan available on the Stanford Library website is intact (and much better quality)—and is worth perusing just for the inscription on the flyleaf.  Here is the beginning of the song in question, as it appears in the Stanford scan:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Image 23 (detail) of https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10580550

Uniquely (it appears) among the Canzonettas, “Transport of Pleasure”/“Content” was actually a retexting of a song Haydn had originally written to a German text (“Der verdienstvolle Sylvius”).  That song appears to have been a favorite of Haydn’s, as during his second London visit he chose to sing it himself at a meet-and-greet with George III.  (Haydn's early biographer Griesinger records Haydn's recollections of this here.)  Glancing at the text, one might imagine a nudge-nudge-wink-wink between Haydn and the king.  While not overtly obscene, the text describes the body of the (female) lover in a bizarre coded language, vaguely reminiscent of the Song of Solomon.  I paraphrase:  My flock is only two small lambs, my field only a patch of clover, but if only you understood, I am a King, because I am the most in love of all mortals on earth.   Hmmmm....  wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

(For those interested, there’s an excellent recording of this version by the incomparable Anne Sofie von Otter with fortepianist Melvyn Tan.)

The subsequent (first) English text has a similar theme, as if a loose paraphrase. It is less suggestive of the body itself, although it does give her a name—Julia—and describes his intimacies with her.  It goes on for two stanzas, saving the climax for the end.  The text is anonymous (and I don't wonder); that it is directly related to the original German seems likely because of the fleeting reference to flocks and fields in the second stanza.  Here it is in its entirety.

What though no high descent I claim
No line of Kings or race divine,
Not all the mighty Sons of fame
Can vaunt of joys surpassing mine
Possess'd of blooming Julia’s charms,
My heart alive to love’s alarms;
   Transported with pleasure
   I’m bless’d beyond measure;
Such raptures I find in her arms. 

What though no robe of Tyrian dye,
No gold of Ophir I can boast,
Nor fields, nor flocks, yet rich am I
In wealth the gods might envy most,
For mine are blooming Julia’s charms,
With love my throbbing heart alarms;
    By love transported with pleasure
    I’m bless’d beyond measure
And die with delight in her arms.

“Die with delight” is scarcely a subtle trope, particularly after the “throbbing heart.”  Is this the handiwork of Anne Hunter, the lyricist of many of the other canzonettas?  Some sources attribute it to her, but in the critical report Helms is cautious enough to say that both the poet and Haydn’s source for the text are unknown.) It seems a more reckless dry run for Hunter’s later parting lament “O Tuneful Voice.”  (Incidentally, I think JHW is wrong in that  song not to capitalize Echo; it has “In echo’s cave,” when surely this refers to the mythological nymph Echo, not something more abstract.)  Whoever penned this song, the text was deemed reckless enough to be toned down several notches for the next print run.  Its replacement, “Content,” still retains the ovine reference, but now it is down to a single lamb.  How tame!  The climactic passage is reduced to “This heart, secure in its treasure / Is bless’d beyond measure, / Nor envies the monarch his throne.”  Pure, chaste, and (dare I say?) tedious by comparison.  

Most curious to me is that this seems to be the least performed (in any version) and least discussed of any of the canzonettas, and yet there seems to be the most to say and to hear.  The coverlet of good taste thrown on it in 1796 may have done it in.  The Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon seems to have only gradually woken to the nature of the text.  In 1976, in the third volume of his massive Chronicle & Works, in the “chronicle” section he remarks merely

For some reason not immediately apparent — can Lady Charlotte [Bertie, the set's dedicatee] have thought the original text slightly immodest? — new words and a new title were soon applied to the song and the plates were altered.  [p. 315]

But he came around even before finishing the volume, as in the “works” section he continues:

...there is no doubt that Haydn has if anything accentuated the erotic content, especially towards the end, where Haydn, having acheived a rather breathless series of triplets (“transported with pleasure, I'm blest [sic] beyond measure”), drops to pianissimo and in the third-last bar, slows the tempo to “piu adagio” in what Lady Bertie might have considered a post-coital slackening.  [Ibid., p. 392]

(But who can know the mind of Lady Bertie?)  Seven years later Landon produced a facsimile of all three original editions of the song, plus Haydn's full-length sketch.  The first edition of the German version appeared in 1795, but the text was modified to transfer the voice from “Sylvius” to a “lovely shepherdess.”  (This was “Das Geständniß einer schönen Schäferinn,” appearing in the Prague periodical Die Allgemeine Musikalische Bibliothek.)  This alteration had a bowdlerizing effect, as all of the subtle Song of Solomon imagery—if that is indeed what it is—is reduced to just idle chatter about two sheep in a clover patch.  Hardly something I would expect to interest even “Farmer George,” this seems unlikely to me to be the version Haydn sang for the king.